Thinking, Fast and Slow

The guru to the gurus at last shares his knowledge with the rest of us. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's seminal studies in behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, and happiness studies have influenced numerous other authors, including Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman at last offers his own, first book for the general public. It is a lucid and enlightening summary of his life's work. It will change the way you think about thinking. Two systems drive the way we think and make choices, Kahneman explains....

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman - A 30-Minute Summary

With Instaread Summaries, you can get the summary of a book in 30 minutes or less. We read every chapter, summarize, and analyze it for your convenience. This is an Instaread Summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth - and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell challenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, offering a new interpretation of what it means to be discriminated against, or cope with a disability, or lose a parent, or attend a mediocre school, or suffer from any number of other apparent setbacks. Gladwell begins with the real story of what happened between the giant and the shepherd boy those many years ago.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

In his landmark best seller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant, in the blink of an eye, that actually aren't as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept?

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't

Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger - all by the time he was 30. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

Influence: Science and Practice, ePub, 5th Edition

Widely used in classes, as well as sold to people operating successfully in the business world, the eagerly awaited revision of Influence reminds the listener of the power of persuasion. Cialdini organizes compliance techniques into six categories based on psychological principles that direct human behavior: reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity.

Dubito Ergo Sum says:"This book will change the way you see the world."

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs - a real-life Tony Stark - and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new makers.

Outliers: The Story of Success

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.

Scrum

By the man who helped invent the red-hot management process known as "Scrum", Scrum unveils what is wrong with the way we currently do work, and how a simple set of principles, applied in exactly the right sequence, can accelerate productivity and quality as much as 1200 percent. Scrum (which gets its name from the formation in rugby in which the whole team locks its arms to gain control of the ball) is the reason that Amazon can launch a new feature on its website every day.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

In flow, everyday experience becomes a moment by moment opportunity for joy and self-fulfillment. Flow is the brain-child of a fascinating psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a renowned social scientist who has devoted his life's work to the study of what makes people truly happy, satisfied and fulfilled. While much of the study of psychology investigates disorders of the human mind, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi takes a different route.

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

To most of us, learning something 'the hard way' implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head and will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Maverick thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb had an illustrious career on Wall Street before turning his focus to his black swan theory. Not all swans are white, and not all events, no matter what the experts think, are predictable. Taleb shows that black swans, like 9/11, cannot be foreseen and have an immeasurable impact on the world.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

This audiobook is about luck, or more precisely, how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. It is already a landmark work, and its title has entered our vocabulary. In its second edition, Fooled by Randomness is now a cornerstone for anyone interested in random outcomes.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over brainstorming in teams. Although they are often labeled "quiet," it is to introverts that we owe many of the great contributions to society--from van Gogh’s sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

In The Tipping Point, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell looks at why major changes in society happen suddenly and unexpectedly. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a few fare-beaters and graffiti artists fuel a subway crime wave, or a satisfied customer fill the empty tables of a new restaurant. These are social epidemics, and the moment when they take off, when they reach their critical mass, is the Tipping Point.

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

In The Black Swan Taleb outlined a problem, and in Antifragile he offers a definitive solution: how to gain from disorder and chaos while being protected from fragilities and adverse events. For what Taleb calls the "antifragile" is actually beyond the robust, because it benefits from shocks, uncertainty, and stressors, just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension. The antifragile needs disorder in order to survive and flourish. Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner.

SuperFreakonomics

SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as: How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa? What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common? Can eating kangaroo save the planet? Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling like no one else.

The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life

Present moment awareness is an essential ingredient in life if one expects to experience any degree of authentic peace and contentment. It has been acknowledged for centuries as the cornerstone of spiritual awakening in all traditions of Eastern thought. In the West, however, it is still a relatively unrecognized concept for living. The Western mind is always restless, never content with the moment.

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?

Publisher's Summary

The guru to the gurus at last shares his knowledge with the rest of us. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's seminal studies in behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, and happiness studies have influenced numerous other authors, including Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman at last offers his own, first book for the general public. It is a lucid and enlightening summary of his life's work. It will change the way you think about thinking.

Two systems drive the way we think and make choices, Kahneman explains: System One is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System Two is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Examining how both systems function within the mind, Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities as well as the biases of fast thinking and the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and our choices. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, he shows where we can trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking, contrasting the two-system view of the mind with the standard model of the rational economic agent.

Kahneman's singularly influential work has transformed cognitive psychology and launched the new fields of behavioral economics and happiness studies. In this path-breaking book, Kahneman shows how the mind works, and offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and personal lives - and how we can guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble.

What the Critics Say

“A tour de force. . . Kahneman’s book is a must read for anyone interested in either human behavior or investing. He clearly shows that while we like to think of ourselves as rational in our decision making, the truth is we are subject to many biases. At least being aware of them will give you a better chance of avoiding them, or at least making fewer of them.” (Larry Swedroe, CBS News)

“A major intellectual event . . . The work of Kahneman and Tversky was a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.” (David Brooks, The New York Times)

“[Thinking, Fast and Slow] is wonderful, of course. To anyone with the slightest interest in the workings of his own mind, it is so rich and fascinating that any summary would seem absurd.” (Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair)

What did you like best about Thinking, Fast and Slow? What did you like least?

A very large portion of the time when I am listening to audio books, I am working out or walking the dog. Unfortunately, this audio book is ill suited to those types of activities. The material is interesting and well presented, but frequently too abstract when you have to compensate for frequent minor distractions. It would be best listened to with the accompanying PDF in front of you and the rewind button easily at hand to review what the author has written when he presents examples. Despite the, the book is a good listen if you are interested in probability, statistics, economics, and psychology. I will very likely borrow a written copy of the book at some time in the future to review the sections that were just too difficult for me to fully understand in the audio format.

Were the concepts of this book easy to follow, or were they too technical?

The key problem I found was that the author frequently presents several types of statistical comparisons at once and then asks the listener to compare them. This may be simple in a written format, but in a audible format it can be very difficult, especially without a rewind or stop button easily available. As in most technical books with a little bit of depth, one often needs a little time and review to fully understand the concepts an author is presenting. Saying that does not discredit the author, but means that the listener is going to have to spend a little more time, effort, and preparation to understand what the author is sharing with the listener. Again, listening to the book with the accompanying PDF in front of me and my finger on the index button would have likely made a huge difference in my experience.

What did you like best about Thinking, Fast and Slow? What did you like least?

This is a great book best experienced in another form. Many times the narrator refers to illustrations or figures that are available separately. The digital ebook or paper book version of this is probably a better way to experience this.

This book provides some great insights into how our minds work, and when you analyze your own, you will soon realize that yours is also being hacked on a daily basis without you even being aware of it. Being an IT security expert, it is difficult to not draw parallels to that universe when reading this book, realizing how our minds are being exploited on a daily basis without us even noticing.Some of the topics and examples are fairly well known and the reader have most likely heard about or experienced them before, but here you get a good explaination for them and how much of it fit together. Those of you who are facinated by skilled mentalists like Derren Brown will gain some insights to some of their

What did you like best about this story?

The easy-to-grasp explainations and the practical examples demonstrating how these traits apply also to the readers mind.

What about Patrick Egan’s performance did you like?

Very good reading voice and overall performance, perfect fit with the right level of authority and credibility.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I would have never imagined such a thought process existed. Kahneman does an amazing job in describing the method of behavioral decision making. He breaks it down into two systems, system one and system two, that are responsible for the way we think and make choices. System one being fast, intuitive, and emotional; while system two is slower, more premeditated, and more logical. While listening to the book I began to inquire about my thought process and which system was more dominant in significant decisions I have made to this day.

If you are interested in how you and others make decisions I would highly recommend this book. The knowledge gained is relevant throughout your life time and is an excellent topic of conversation for just about any setting. If you like this review I would advise following through with system one and add this book to cart!

Although this book is essentially twice as long as any other book in it's category, it's worth it. If you are interested in how humans think and understanding what "intuition" is from a scientific perspective is, click "Add to cart" NOW. I had a lot of fun with it and can honestly say I understand things in my life quite different after this one. You will carry around this new found knowledge with you to the office, the field, conferences, parties.

The general idea of the book is in the understanding of how our two "systems" as he puts it, interact with each other to make decisions in our lives. We have a very quick, responsive system that reminds me very much like a calculator or RAM on a computer and then a more cognitive, "thinking" system that is truly lazy. Basing off the first system inputs, if our surroundings seem parallel with a heuristic or "match", the second system commits to that decision. I apologize because I'm trying to sum up 20 great hours of explanation into a few sentences.

Being that I work in design/user experience for an impacting company I have read a number of these "types" of books. This had the most info and was the easiest to close the cover and go "holy $---, I get it now!" Enjoy!

Overall this is a great piece because you will pick up something new each time you listen to it. But it makes reference to the PDF files attached. This isn't going to help while driving or doing chores.

I had the same problem with Wiseman's "59 seconds" but I solved that with getting a hard copy.

I've been a junkie on this topic ever since I took the first class Richard Thaler (Author of "Nudge" and heavily cited in this book) ever offered on Behavioral Decision Theory. Kahneman and Tversky are the great pioneers of the subject. Kahneman's book does not disappoint. This subject is so important it should be required reading.

Kahneman does an excellent job of making the subject clear and understandable. The narration is excellent. This is a first-class effort in every way.

Still listening. Sometimes the chapters have to be rewound. Brimming with insights. As the argument progresses, one sometimes needs to stop, slow-think in system 2, and then restart. The work cannot be praised enough. At every other turn one is reminded of Socrates, whose premise was that the ideas exist in us. They just need to be drawn out by proper application of the mind. This book is brimming with ideas so well presented that once understood, they very easily become system 1 (with some practice of course). Amazing.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Thinking, Fast and Slow?

Learning the tools by which to understand and apply the book. This would be the first two hours. One moment is hard to pinpoint in such non-fiction as this.

What three words best describe Patrick Egan’s voice?

The narrator could be better. But its ok. The work is very powerful, and the narrator is good enough. This could be something subjective as well so I don't want to judge harshly. I am enjoying the audio book very much. Thank you.

Software developer (Java, Ruby on Rails, Android) and all-around computer nerd, as well as an avid reader and listener of intercommunication- and psychology-related books. Not much for fiction, but I love cool non-fiction!

I've already purchased two copies of this for my friends because I considered it so enlightening and eye-opening.

This book is extremely comprehensive, yet none of the material can be considered "filler" nor did I consider any of it to be boring in any way. I've been an avid reader/listener of neuroscience materials for quite some time, and this listen gained me more novel, original knowledge on this subject than I've been able to gather for a long while, and I've been able to apply a large portion of it practically in my own life, which is important to me (unactionable, non-applicable knowledge is useless in my opinion).

The narration is excellent and can be comfortably listened to at speeds higher than 1x if desired (I was listening at 1.25x), which says a lot about how well-spoken and clear the book's narration was. Patrick Egan also did a wonderful job at inflection and was not at all monotonous.

If you like "figuring out" how people think and why they think that way (including your own thinking), then this book is for you. Very good listen indeed!

Daniel Kahneman explains many of the decisions we make and why we make them. He explains intuition in a way that is clearly understandable, and very reasonable. He does tend to get very technical, and sometimes it gets very slow between the final conclusion, but it is worth bearing through to fully comprehend the final result.

This book is worth reading/listening to, because the information conveyed is worth learning.

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